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Writer Brian K. Vaughan has informed the masses that Apple has banned the sale of Saga #12 due to two "small" gay sex scenes found in the opening pages of the comic. Vaughan writes:

As has hopefully been clear from the first page of our first issue, SAGA is a series for the proverbial “mature reader.” Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow’s SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps. This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go. Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing shit.

Apologies to everyone who reads our series on iPads or iPhones, but here are your alternatives for Wednesday:

1) Head over to you friendly neighborhood comics shop and pick up a physical copy of our issue that you can have and hold forever.

2) While you’re at it, don’t forget to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which helps protect retailers who are brave enough to carry work that some in their communities might consider offensive. You can find signed copies of Saga at the CBLDF site right now.

4) If all else fails, you might be able to find SAGA #12 in Apple’s iBookstore, which apparently sometimes allows more adult material to be sold than through its apps. Crazy, right?

Anyway, special thanks to Eric Stephenson and everyone at Image for supporting our decision, and for always being so supportive of creators. Sorry again to readers for the inconvenience, but I hope everyone will be able to find an issue that Fiona and I are particularly proud of. And after you do, please check out PanelSyndicate.com, the new digital comics site I own with artist Marcos Martin, which remains 100% uncensored by corporate overlords.

Having read the comic in question, it took me three go-arounds to find the offensive images, all the while I was using my work computer. To be blunt, if you didn't know you were looking for one dude sticking another dude's penis in his mouth, there's a very good chance you'd never see it. Luckily, Apple is far better at sniffing out explicit blowjobs than I am.

On the plus side, this does mean that while Apple doesn't support explicit gay sex, they do support misshapen (but flaccid) giant penises, boobs, sex creatures consisting only of mouths and legs, and straight sex (as long as you don't actually see genital penetration). Yay, comics!

Thank god! I bought this for my children to read, expecting it to only feature child-appropriate material like sex with topless mutant spider women, and was really appalled to find it had gay stuff in there. I hope Image learns a lesson from this and sticks to showing 20 foot tall giant testicles and stays away from homosexuality.

On a serious note, Apple was one of the companies who petitioned the Supreme Court in support of gay marriage, so I find it surprising they would ban this comic for that reason. Are we sure that's the real reason and not because they just now figured out how obscene the entire book is?

S.F. Jude Terror wrote:On a serious note, Apple was one of the companies who petitioned the Supreme Court in support of gay marriage, so I find it surprising they would ban this comic for that reason. Are we sure that's the real reason and not because they just now figured out how obscene the entire book is?

It's probably due to the penis penetration. All the other scenes just implied penis penetration, this one actually showed it.

I would be interested to see what Apple has to say about this though. They are ok with alien, television-headed robots having sex or one character asking another character to shoot it in her twat but they draw the line at this?

S.F. Jude Terror wrote:Thank god! I bought this for my children to read, expecting it to only feature child-appropriate material like sex with topless mutant spider women, and was really appalled to find it had gay stuff in there. I hope Image learns a lesson from this and sticks to showing 20 foot tall giant testicles and stays away from homosexuality.

Alien Sex has always been far more socially acceptable since Abbot and Costello go to Venus.